'In 1915, Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald was the last Australian to leave an exposed position at Gallipoli. He was awarded the DSO for that and served on the Western Front through to the end of the Great War. Everywhere he went, often while in danger, he collected materials that marked his experience – photographs, orders, his battalion’s timetable for evacuation, and a souvenir map of Gallipoli that he annotated by hand. He wrote careful comments on everything he kept, transforming public documents into personal sites of memory and retrieval. He also kept a diary for the first year of his experience, covering Gallipoli, Egypt, and France. Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War personalises the difficult position of a front-line officer by closely examining the things he carried, collected, and preserved for the rest of his life.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War: An Anzac Archive is a rather appropriately laconic take on the military life of Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald, who served as a major in the Twentieth Battalion AIF during the First World War. What distinguishes this book from other soldier biographies is its unusual method, which largely confines itself to an inquiry into the documents, photographs, and clippings that its subject carefully preserved and annotated as a personal archive of his war experience. To quote the author, "it is an affect biography, speculating why he held on to those particular items: what they say about him and his immediate world, and, importantly, what sense of role and personality he sought to preserve, to project into later memory, by forming them into an archive" (xii, my emphasis). Fitz-Gerald's archive includes "sixty-odd items, including official communications (but no personal letters), studio and field photographs, a timetable for evacuating Gallipoli, a souvenir map, copies of battalion daily orders, and two entire copies of magazines" (xiv). The author supplements this officer's personal archive with service records; a small, short, private diary; and several historical citations of his service. Fitz-Gerald's archive is read as a commentary on the official account of the war's remembrance during the 1920s and '30s, but it is more specifically interested in the ways in which Fitz-Gerald himself may have conceived and utilized the archive as a mnemonic for managing his self-identification and social representation across official roles and in reflections of a more personal nature.' (Introduction)
'Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War: An Anzac Archive is a rather appropriately laconic take on the military life of Major Richard Francis Fitz-Gerald, who served as a major in the Twentieth Battalion AIF during the First World War. What distinguishes this book from other soldier biographies is its unusual method, which largely confines itself to an inquiry into the documents, photographs, and clippings that its subject carefully preserved and annotated as a personal archive of his war experience. To quote the author, "it is an affect biography, speculating why he held on to those particular items: what they say about him and his immediate world, and, importantly, what sense of role and personality he sought to preserve, to project into later memory, by forming them into an archive" (xii, my emphasis). Fitz-Gerald's archive includes "sixty-odd items, including official communications (but no personal letters), studio and field photographs, a timetable for evacuating Gallipoli, a souvenir map, copies of battalion daily orders, and two entire copies of magazines" (xiv). The author supplements this officer's personal archive with service records; a small, short, private diary; and several historical citations of his service. Fitz-Gerald's archive is read as a commentary on the official account of the war's remembrance during the 1920s and '30s, but it is more specifically interested in the ways in which Fitz-Gerald himself may have conceived and utilized the archive as a mnemonic for managing his self-identification and social representation across official roles and in reflections of a more personal nature.' (Introduction)
